The Zero COVID Brigade

The "lockdowns forever" crowd won't stop once we get the population vaccinated.  Israel now has just over 60% of its people inoculated with at least one Pfizer shot, and here come the "vaccines aren't enough" brigade (emboldening mine):

Naftali Bennett, the former defense minister who coordinated much of the nation’s initial virus response and is now running to replace Netanyahu, accused the government of adopting a strategy that, in his words, can be summed up as, “We’re not going to manage the crisis in this country, we’re going to put all our eggs in the one basket: vaccines,” he told Intelligencer.

“Israel’s entire strategy relies on the hope that no variant will escape the vaccine,” he continued. “If a mutation that can bypass the vaccine appears tomorrow, we’re in trouble.”

On Thursday, at a cabinet meeting convened to debate the future of a partial, fraying lockdown, which is scheduled to end on Sunday, Netanyahu acknowledged that “the British mutation is running amok in Israel,” driving 80 percent of Israel’s recent COVID-19 fatalities.

That public health officials, driven by a messiah complex, might not want to surrender emergency powers is scarcely a new thing, but the idea turns up again and again. Freddie Sayers in Unherd did a good writeup on the subject of Zero COVID, a movement he claims is "crucially distinct from people who support ongoing lockdown measures to suppress the virus to a level where it is safe to reopen — for ZeroCovid believers, we cannot rest until that level is zero."

This distinction does not actually matter. The reason for this is that the main response to outbreaks has in fact been more stringent and longer lockdowns. Essentially, whether you want to call it Zero COVID or not, what it means is putting the US in a state of permanent emergency should the virus become another of the endemic respiratory viruses. The Biden administration is waffling on whether it wants to actually do this:

So far, the Biden administration has tried to have it both ways—coddling those who appear to welcome a perpetual pandemic while assuring those who don’t that deliverance is near at hand. In a pre-Super Bowl interview with CBS News, President Biden said that it was necessary and possible for schools to reopen safely in accordance with CDC guidelines, which will be forthcoming shortly (never mind that the CDC produced just such a set of guidelines as far back as last August). But a sprawling White House COVID-19 strategy memo released by the Biden White House last month also provides for the possibility that “new coronavirus variants that may have a higher transmission rate” might forestall the resumption of full-day, in-person education. And, in a late January call with teachers’ unions’ representatives, Fauci said that those variants, which “may” be more resistant to vaccines, are likely to scuttle the president’s desire to see K-8 classrooms reopen nationally.

 But once we get vaccines that, at least, will prevent hospitalization and death, there has to be some level of disease burden we're willing to tolerate rather than stay hunkered down indefinitely. The most recent bad influenza season, 2017-18, saw over 800,000 hospitalizations and 61,000 deaths (estimated). Meanwhile, in Israel, over 90% of the 60+ population has been vaccinated, and the results are quite striking:

 Yes, younger cohorts now make up a larger fraction of new cases (per the New Yorker article, 44% under 19 years old and an increasing number from the under 50 crowd). But given what we know about outcomes, these groups are unlikely to get severe disease. At some point, we'll have to ramp up vaccine production and learn to live with this disease. We don't really have a choice.